Pages

Tuesday, 1 March 2016

O Colour, Where Art Thou?

I’ve been
really, really, really struggling with the colors in my comic book. I suck at
colour. I’ve lost sleep over colour. I wish colour would just die. But then I
found this comic book that exploded my brain and helped me get my colour back
on track.

When I
started working on the colours for “Heroes Rising”, my solution was to ‘borrow’
[read: copy] the style of one of my favorite artists, Francesco Frankavilla.
The only problem was he’s a genius and I’m not. If you’ve seen my “Heroes
Rising” preview pages, then you’ll understand where I started in terms
of color. I saw Frankavilla’s work on “Afterlife With Archie” and was blown
away, so I wanted to make my book look as dark and atmospheric as he made
“Archie”.

Problem was
I had no clue what I was doing. As I began to tackle the other 14 pages of
issue #1, I realized I was in big trouble. I just sort of fudged my way through
each sequence, not really understanding what I was doing. My big problem was mixing
and matching appropriate colours. Frankavilla could pick and choose from a
palette he had in his head, and it all worked. When I tried to construct a
palette, it fell apart. I didn’t have the colour sense to make it work. But I
pressed on, not really happy with the result, but what else could I do?

Then this
weekend, at my local comic book store, I came across a re-released issue of
“Outcast” #1 by Robert Kirkman and Paul Azaceta. The cover really grabbed me,
because it reminded me a lot of Frankavilla’s work.

It’s a
fantastic book, and the art is amazing. But the unsung hero of the Outcast
series is Elizabeth Breitweiser. http://elizabreitweiser.tumblr.com/ I was blown
away by her colours in this book! I feel she took some of Frankavilla’s
sensibilities and made them more grounded in reality, something that really
spoke to me. I was unconsciously trying to do the same thing but didn’t grasp
what I needed to do. I wanted moody shadows and noir-esque lighting, and
Breitweiser showed me how to make it work without going too bold and graphic-y,
something I struggled with when using Frankavilla’s style. I can’t make
characters purple! I just can’t sell that convincingly! Frankavilla can, but
not me. More Outcast images:

So I looked
at Breitweiser’s work closely, and it made me re-evaluate not just what colours
to use, but how I was colouring. I realized I was trying to create a palette
out of my head, and it wasn’t working. I wasn’t using the power of the
computer, with its layers and transparencies, to help me. So basically my mind
finally exploded in a Eureka moment and I totally changed how I approached
colour.

My Colouring Method

The
following is a rundown of how I approach colouring a panel. I’m using Clip
Studio Paint [aka Manga Studio]. This is by far the best program for drawing a
comic I’ve come across. Its word balloon functions alone are worth the purchase and just blows Illustrator out
of the water. And the feel of the pen tool is just awesome. I work at 1200 dpi
so my artwork is at the highest res possible for output. (I use Photoshop CS6
to scale the final artwork down to 300 dpi. Photoshop uses a better algorithm
and gives smoother re-scaling results I’ve found.)

Thumbnail

So each
panel starts with a rough thumbnail. This is purely for staging and shot
angles.

Rough clean
up

I then do a
rough clean up pass to figure out all the structure of the characters and
backgrounds.

Ink

Final ink
over the roughs.

Base Colour

I colour
the character with a base colour. I approach this as if the character is in
full sunlight, so all the colours are bright.

Tone Base

Then I add
a transparent layer to tone the character (in this case bluish). The tone
depends on the lighting of the scene.

Shadow

Then I add
another transparent layer to add shadows. I use pure black and make the
transparency around 50%.

Highlights

I add the
highlights above the tone layer to give them a brighter contrast.

Final
Touches

In this
panel I added some glow (just white watercolour brush) to give it that hazy
sunlit look. The glow goes above the ink layer to give it that soft look.

So there
you go. I’m much happier with the result, and I have way more control over the
palette thanks to the use of transparencies.

Of course,
once I figured this out, all my previous colouring started to look like crap. So I’ve begun revising the colour on all my original 10 preview pages. Sigh!
But I’m hoping the end result will be worth the effort.